You are here:

Paul Krugman: Trump and the aristocracy of fraud

NEW YORK — It turns out that I may have done President Donald Trump an injustice.

You see, I’ve always been skeptical of his claims to be a great dealmaker. But what we’ve just learned is that his negotiating prowess began early. Indeed, it was so amazing that he was already making $200,000 a year in today’s dollars at a very young age.

Specifically, that’s what he was making when he was three years old. He was a millionaire by the age of eight. Of course, the money came from his father — who spent decades evading the taxes he was legally required to pay on money given to his children.

The blockbuster New York Times report on the Trump family’s history of fraud is really about two distinct although linked kinds of fraudulence.

On one side, the family engaged in tax fraud on a huge scale, using a variety of money-laundering techniques to